Office of the Press Secretary
(New York, New York)
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release October 7, 1999

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT DSCC RECEPTION

Local 1199
New York, New York

5:59 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Please be seated.

Let me, first of all, thank Dennis, and all of you, for this event
and for your support for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
Senator Shumer was supposed to be here tonight, but they're voting late,
so he's working for you, and I'm filling in for him. (Laughter.)
That's sort of getting prepared for my life after the Presidency. I'm
sort of the stand-in speaker tonight for Chuck Shumer. (Laughter.)

I'd like to thank you again for your support for the Senators, and
I'd like to thank, as I always try to do, the people of New York City
and New York State for being so very good to me and the Vice President
and our whole administration over these last six and a half years.

I would like to just make a brief statement about the event that
we're here for. I think all of you know that we Democrats have
maintained a constant commitment to the health care of our people, and
to the well-being of the health care network. We all are very well
aware that, as Hillary warned us back in 1994, the number of uninsured
people continues to rise -- and will continue to do so until we do
things that cover more people, and stem the hemorrhaging of loss of
coverage.

I will say this: we've got some specific proposals out there that I
think will begin to make a dent in that this year. This is the first
year that all the states are enrolled in the Children's Health Insurance
Program. Now what we have to do is go out and get the children enrolled
-- the states are enrolled; we have to get the children enrolled.

As all of you know -- I see a lot of you nodding your heads -- it's
easier to say than to do; to find these people, to tell them that even
though they may be Medicaid-eligible, they are eligible for this; please
come enroll. But we need to make a huge, Herculean effort over the next
six months, to get every single eligible child in America enrolled in
these programs. It will also help to alleviate the financial problems
of a lot of our health care providers, and we need to do it.

The second thing I would note is that in my Medicare reform this
year, I have asked the Congress to allow people between the ages of 55
and 65 to buy into the Medicare program. A lot of the people without
health insurance between 55 and 65 can't get health insurance from
anybody else. But they're middle-class people, and they do have the
funds to afford a Medicare buy-in. We can do that with the present
budget I've given the Congress, and I hope we will do it.

The third thing I would note is, I do believe that some time before
the Congress goes home, they will pass what is known as the
Kennedy-Jeffords bill, which will allow disabled people on Medicaid to
go into the workplace and keep their Medicaid, which will put more
people in the workplace and continue the flow of funds to the health
care system and enables them to keep their health care.

There will doubtless be more to be debated about. Now, let me say
a word about what happened in 1997. I am not at all surprised that the
1997 Balanced Budget Act imposed greater burdens on the health care
system than were estimated. And some of you were involved in that and
know that we -- we had a figure of the savings we wanted to achieve and
we, in the administration, having good data from all of you, gave the
Congress a set of changes we thought would be necessary to meet that
figure.

The Congressional Budget Office did not believe we would achieve
those savings and, therefore, said we had to do more things. So we did
everything that the CBO said we had to do, and we had more savings than
we needed to meet the original budget targets, and it came right out of
the teaching hospitals, a lot of the therapeutic services people, a lot
of -- all of you know this.

We are working hard now. I've had a conversation -- every time
they come back from New York or anywhere else, Hillary and the Vice
President ask me, when are we going to do something about this Medicaid
problem, we've got to deal with this. We understand that. I think that
there is now a consensus in the Congress in both Houses, and I think
increasingly in both parties, that part of the last budget negotiations
will require funds flowing back to deal with this problem, and I will do
the best I can with that.

Let me just make some general points here. When I came to New York
in 1992 as the nominee, with my family and my then very new vice
presidential partner and his family, and asked the American people and
the people of this state to take a chance on us because we thought we
could turn the country around, and it's been so long since things were
bad, people had forgotten how bad they were in 1992, but they were quite
bad, indeed.

I asked you to take a chance based on an argument I made. I said,
you know, I think that the politics of division in Washington are
hurting America. You've either got to be pro-business or pro-labor.
You've got to be pro-growth or pro-environment. All these things have
to be opposed to one another. You have to be for big deficits or
cutting spending on education.

And I just don't believe that's the way the world works. I never
have believed that. All of us, in our own lives, try to find ways to
unify our objectives, and pull things together, to go forward.

And so I said to the American people, look, give me a chance to try
to push a policy that will provide opportunity to every responsible
citizen, and will bring all people together in one community; that will
allow us to be pro-business and pro-labor, pro-environment and
pro-growth, get rid of the deficit but continue to invest in education.

And it was just an argument, but the American people decided to
give us a chance -- probably, frankly, because the country was in such
tough shape. It was really tough.

Well, after six years, it's not an argument anymore. There is now
evidence. And I'm very proud that with the help of the Democratic
members of the Senate, without whom none of this would have been
possible, we now have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years; the
lowest welfare rolls in 32 years; the lowest poverty rates in 20 years;
the highest home ownership in history; the first back-to-back balanced
budget surpluses in 42 years; and the longest economic expansion in
peacetime in our history, with over 19 million new jobs. It's not an
argument anymore.

Now, the issue before the American people is, some say, whether we
should change. That is not the question. We are going to change. This
country's been changing for over 200 years; that's why we're still here.
We're adaptable. We always have new challenges, we always have new
opportunities. The question is not whether we'll change; the question
is how we're going to change.

We can take a u-turn and go back to the policies that got us in
trouble in the first place. I've tried to stop those. Some of the most
important achievements of the last six years involved stopping the
Contract with America; stopping this ill-advised, huge tax cut that I
vetoed -- which, by the way, would have made it utterly impossible to do
what we ought to do in Medicare.

But I would just ask you as citizens to think about the big things
we can do now because of the country's prosperity. And let me just
mention three. And it's time to think about the big things.

Big thing number one that all of you deal with in health care,
we've got to deal with the aging of America. People are living longer
and the number of people over 65 will double in 30 years. I hope to be
one of them. And we have a chance, and I would argue, an obligation, to
save Social Security and push the life of Social Security out beyond the
life expectancy of the whole baby boom generation. We can do that now.

We have an obligation not only to properly fund Medicare, but to
extend the life of it and to add a prescription drug benefit. I was
just asked again today about all these people who live in New York,
Vermont, Maine, along the Canadian border, going across the border to
Canada to buy American drugs much cheaper than they can buy them in
America. If we would give people on Medicare the option, purely the
option, to buy in to a prescription drug program that could use market
power to get discount prices, we could deal with the problems of 75
percent of the seniors in this country that don't have access to those
pharmaceuticals now. I think it's important.

That's big challenge number one. Big challenge number two, as New
York knows, we have the largest and most diverse student population in
our schools in history. We have done everything we could with the HOPE
Scholarships and other aids to give everybody who can go access to
college. But no one believes that we're giving a world-class education
to every child in K through 12 yet.

So it's time to build them modern schools and give them more
teachers, and have high standards, but give them access to summer school
and after-school and mentoring programs, so you don't declare the kids
failures when the system is failing them.

This is important. We ought to say, we're not going to rest until
the children in our public schools have the same access to quality
education that children in our institutions of higher education do.
That's a big idea, worth fighting for.

The third thing I'd like to say is we need to think about the 21st
century economy. As you know here, from upstate New York to some
neighborhoods in New York City, not everybody has participated in our
prosperity. As a matter of fact, part of the problems are hospitals
have today is that not everybody has participated in our prosperity.
You still have a lot of poor people who can't afford to pay who have to
have care.

I have offered the American people from the empowerment zone
program in 1993 to our New Markets Initiative now, a way to bring more
people into our enterprise system. I think people with money in America
ought to get the same tax breaks and other incentives to invest in poor
areas in America we today give them to invest in Latin America and the
Caribbean and Africa. I don't want to take those other incentives away,
but I think you ought to have the same option to grow a business here
you do in our poor countries to the south and around the world.

And finally, I think we ought to get this country out of debt for
the first time since 1835. We can do that in 15 years. Now, anybody in
this room over 40 who took economics in college was taught that a
country should always be a little bit in debt, that somehow that's
healthy. And when we learned it, it was true. It's not true anymore
for a rich countries because interest rates are set globally, and if we
can make America debt-free over the next 15 years, it means lower
interest rates for business loans, for hospital construction, for
college loans, for home loans, for car loans. It means more jobs and
higher incomes.

It means when our friends around the world that have to buy the
things we produce get in trouble, they can borrow money to get out of
trouble at a lower cost. It could ensure a generation of prosperity.
We can do it now. We should think big. Now, let me just mention one
final issue. I can talk about this all night, because I want America to
start thinking big about it.

We have the lowest crime rate in 26 years, and I'm proud of that.
And it's nationwide in every big city. We're seeing -- with the same
strategies there that have worked here, community policing and careful
targeting of certain kinds of crime in certain areas. But no one thinks
it's as low as it ought to be. No one thinks America is as safe as it
ought to be. So I would like to see people stand up and say, okay,
we've got the lowest crime rate in 26 years; now we need a real goal.
Let's make America the safest big country in the world. If we're the
most prosperous big country in the world, if we have more freedom than
anybody else in the world, we ought to be able to make it the safest big
country in the world.

We have to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. We
have to do more to keep guns out of the hands of children who die at an
accidental rate -- listen to this -- accidental rate from gun deaths in
America, nine time higher than the next 25 industrial countries in the
world combined. But we can do it if we make up our mind to do it.

In closing, let me say the other thing that I'm proud to be a
Democrat about, besides these big ideas, is that we stand for the idea
that we can be one America across all the racial, religious, gender,
sexual orientation and other lines that divide us. We believe our
common humanity is more important than our differences, which make life
interesting, but which are not fundamental to our common cause.

If you look at all the trouble we've had in the world in the last
20 years, just the trouble we've had in the world in the last six and a
half years since I've been President, from the Middle East to Northern
Ireland, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to the tribal wars in Africa, our
continuing inability to get over our fear, loathing and dehumanization
of people who are different from us is the number one problem the world
has. And it is quite interesting, as we deal with the miracles of
modern medicine, the miracles of the modern Internet, we look forward to
the Human Genome Project, giving every mother a map of her baby's life
when she goes home from the hospital, we are beset by the most primitive
of all human problems: the continuing fear of people who are different
from us.

I can just tell you that the people that we're running and the
policies that will be followed -- and you know, I'm not running for
anything. I'm selling this as a prospective citizen. And what I want
for my daughter and my grandchildren's generation. We'll stand up for
one America, and we'll change. But we don't want a U-turn. We've got
this country going in the right direction, and we want to reach for the
stars.